Gum Democracy

Gum Election is a guerrilla art project which kicked off in New York City in October 2008. Claiming to install “modern democracy” in public space, the project was aimed to encourage people to vote in 2008’s presidential election, and also not to spit out their chewing gums carelessly on the Big Apple’s already dirty pavements.

Posters were taped to walls and lamp posts at more than 50 hot spots throughout the city, enabling passers-by to put their gum on their least favorite candidate’s face. Gum Election became so popular that posters also popped up in other cities in the United States and even abroad.

After two and a half years Gum Election is back on the streets of New York, pitting AT&T against the newly iPhone-capable Verizon Wireless. “Let us know who sucks the most: AT&T or Verizon.” The project’s initiators encourage people to bring the “the new battle for mobile service sovereignty” to their own city: “Print out the poster, put it up and send us pictures of it”. Click here to download your version!

After the popularity of New York’s High Line park, which is located on an abandoned elevated railway, there is a new plan for a Low Line park. Yes, an underground park nearly the size of Gramercy Park. This time, the green transformation takes place in a dark trolley terminal below the streets of the Lower…

Open Source Ecology (OSE), “a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters,” is putting together detailed DIY guides for creating your own farm equipments and other machines such brick makers and a very cool 3D printer (remember the Radiolara pavilion?). Similar to the ‘re-inventing construction’ initiative of Something Fantastic (featured here), OSE is interested in opening…

Last October I wrote about some initiatives that aim to improve the so-called user-generated city. One of those initiatives is the New York BigApps competition, set up by the City of New York asking for innovative applications to make city life more transparent, accessible and accountable. Today the organization announced the winning project — WayFinder NYC….

Thanks to Urban Shit we stumbled upon this great artwork in the Bulgarian capital Sofia. An anonymous artist has paint-brushed the Russian Red Army soldiers into a more contemporary scene. The artist must have thought that a statue of popular superheroes and cartoon characters is perhaps more interesting for people living in this time. We…